Item Description: Modern Perl is suitable for programmers of every level. It's more than a Perl tutorial—only Modern Perl focuses on Perl 5.12 and 5.14, to demonstrate the latest and most effective time-saving features.

Review Synopsis: Modern Perl focuses on more than the Perl language. It begins with the Perl community. It's like, "Here's Perl" and then, "This is how you get, how you get to Perl Street". A unique and refreshing read.

Overview

The newest version of Modern Perl is another great installment in the series written by chromatic. If you've read the first edition of Modern Perl, than you know that it is unlike the standard slew. While books such as the O'Reilly Perl series(learning this, programming that) focus mainly on the language, Modern Perl looks at Perl as a community. It shows some modern best practices and how to use Perl as it stands today. I highly recommend Modern Perl 2011-2012 edition to anyone who uses Perl. It shows how to capitalize on Perl's strengths and how to pave over some of it's weaknesses.

Review

Modern Perl focuses on more than the Perl language. Right off the bat it points out the Perl community. It's like, "Here's Perl" and then, "This is how you get, how you get to Perl Street". Very refreshing as the Perl community is a big a part of what makes Perl great. In my opinion, every Perl book should briefly explain CPAN and the Perl community briefly. With a focus on using modern Perl features and best practices, Modern Perl gives a lot of interesting and important information regarding writing maintainable Perl.

The first two chapters focus on Perl the entity. The power of CPAN, the community, and the philosophy are flaunted and displayed in these introductory chapters. These chapters deserve at least a skim. Interesting stuff.

Chapters three, four, five, and six cover Perl the language. Everything from scalars to loops to regular expressions. Everything is kept nice and brief with some idioms and other nice modern practice spice sprinkled all about. Again, worth a read. If nothing else, you won't be oblivious to alternate view points.

Chapter seven is where we hit where Modern Perl begins to excel. This is the chapter that shows how modern OOP is implemented in Perl in a nice way using Moose. This is essentially a solid base and jumping point for diving into larger Perl projects. I really liked this chapter. It was short and sweet. Peppered with very nice illustrative snippets. Just a very snappy chapter that will make Moose seem very intriguing and cause Perl OOP to not feel like such a chore.

Chapter eight is a testicular kick of useful information. It basically goes over a lot of best practices. It is chock full of useful tips and tidbits about writing maintainable Perl code. Definitely worth checking out. In my opinion, chapter 8 should be a requirement to download Perl.

Chapter nine gives useful information in using Perl in the large. Testing, modules, distribution, and a lot more. If you want to take your Perl to a larger scale, you should definitely read, study, and internalize this chapter.

Chapter ten goes over the wonders of Perl idioms and the super globals, the variables that are not scoped to any package or file. Obviously, a good read. A bit dry, but worth a read. It's really short after all.

Chapter eleven dances with the hilarious world of worst practices. What to avoid. What not to do. I found some of this mildly entertaining. Kind of like Jewish humor... At any rate, it goes great with chapter eight. And since that rhymes, you know it's true.

Finally, chapter twelve goes over more "useful" tidbits. The title is "What's missing?" but covers a couple of pragmas and a couple incompatibilities between Perl versions and how to solve them. Not much going on in this chapter. Kind of lame and unnecessary, but it is what it is.

Conclusion

Outside of a few minor typos I noticed and chapter twelve, I really don't have anything negative to say about Modern Perl. However, I will say that it pushes the Modern::Perl module really hard. That's expected, but meh. Not my cup of tea. Some people love it though. Or, almost forgot. Did I mention, Modern Perl is available for free from it's website?

I agree with you. However I do thoroughly enjoy both. I hadn't done a review for the first edition, so I treated it like I would've the first. However, I do still think it's a great text. Not a vast improvement, but I love both editions regardless.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, chromatic, for making this excellent book available for free. Hopefully, by doing this, it will suffer the same fate as Paulo Coelho's book The Alchemist which sold 12 million print copies after he put a free version online.

Considering no one is spamming anything and I can't shill what I wrote myself and claim to have done, your 'input' is /dev/null. I believe the word your looking for is advertise. That would've been acceptable. However, considering that shilling can be a criminal act, I decided to reply. I politely suggest that you use discretion when placing accusations. And on the record, one link to the original source seems appropriate to me.

If you had copied the entire review in full, I would have been annoyed but not enough to say anything. The fact that you are using your perlmonks post as a teaser to get people to read your blog is over the line and inappropriate.

And considering that this was your first and only post on PerlMonks, I posit that my evaluation of the appropriateness of your post has substantially more merit than yours.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other